


Felix Culpa (nothing gold can stay)

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Classical Music, Female Character of Color, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Routine, Silence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2012-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-19 00:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a reason Joan Watson wakes up the way she does. Despite what Sherlock seems to think, it is not only because she hates her job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Felix Culpa (nothing gold can stay)

It’s not the actual sound of her alarms that ever wakes Joan, when Sherlock hasn’t bothered to orchestrate a point and unplug them; it’s the tinny, hollow silence that rests in between each blare of the clock that startles her out of bed. It’s been like this, for her, for a long time: Joan is so used to the sound of sirens that she’s a little bored of them. She remembers, back in her other life, when she was a surgeon, listening to the terrible blare of every emergency on the floor. It was the kind of noise that went on forever, until she stopped hearing it. Sometimes, when she was visiting her patients in Recovery or the ICU, the noises in the hall sounded like the first, discordant notes of a Gorecki composition. For a while, to echo it, she played recordings of his “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” at work, surrounding herself in the purple guts of her patients and the low, chilling movements of the music; when she did this, she felt infinite. 

Joan is used to the thin edge of sadness and panic that haunts her profession, but even she knows when enough is enough, when her tendencies will really get her into trouble. She hasn’t listened to the Gorecki piece since she left her old job, and there are days where she can’t quite tell what she’s mourning the lack of: the music, the place she belonged, the life she wanted to save, the sureness every moment once had.

That feeling—and the absence of sound, the persistence of loss—is perhaps why she now spends her days chasing Sherlock down the streets of Manhattan, and why she spends six weeks at a time following lost souls from work to home and out into the streets again. Joan is used to hollow people, is a little bit of one herself; Sherlock’s obvious deficiencies, his own empty spaces, are familiar. He’s damaged, and that damage runs deeper than a coke habit, or a predilection for rough sex, or the way he still hasn’t transitioned from one city to another; the way he still acts as though he would be the last thing he ever want to save from a fire. 

As the days feed into each other and Joan becomes aware of the little tidbits of information Sherlock offers her, she learns what to listen for, the small spaces in between his monologues and tantrums: he has one facial tic that she is beginning to hate, mostly because of how sad it makes him. It’s a look of blank compassion and betrayal and terror: his face stutters closed and he loses the manic edge he normally carries, or at least lets it subside a little. Joan usually sees this look when they’ve found a body, or when he’s deduced some horrible secret he can’t prove is true. 

It is the look, she thinks, of someone who has unexpectedly encountered his own limits. Sherlock likes to pretend he doesn’t have any limits or desires or inabilities whatsoever, but it is again and always like the silence in sound, the sudden boundary between things known and unknown. 

At night, back at the brownstone, as she readies herself for bed, Joan listens to him pacing, up and down the stairs, back and forth across the roof. His movements are punctuated by periods of absolute stillness, during which she instead listens to the cars and the drunks on the street. 

Joan is ruthlessly honest with herself, because she has always been her own best trap: she knows all of her limits, even the lost parts of her head that say _stop_ and _go_ , the places in her that are both and hard and soft. Watching Sherlock push up and sink down against the walls that he himself has manufactured, she realizes that the two of them together are perfect ghosts, trespassing on each other’s careful boundaries. 

She falls asleep, watching the numbers on her clock flip over and over, listening for his movements to start up again. In the morning, when her alarms do in fact go off and the little empty sections of the sound startle her—like a heart monitor, the gasp before it measures the next spasm—, she stumbles out of bed to reset them, ending at the doorway in her pajamas, shaking her head clear. Sherlock is already there, waiting impatiently, tapping his feet and snapping the fingers of one hand; the other holds a mug of coffee, which he shoves at her. 

“There’s news, there’s news, there’s news,” he singsongs at her, so perfectly awful that she levels him with her most professional stare, looking for a sign that he’s using, that he’s unraveling. He doesn’t appear to be: “Watson, do put on your dressing gown and drink this reprehensible beverage so we can get on with the morning murders.”

Joan feels her hands reach up and out and close around the mug, instead of around his throat, as if it wasn’t a contest between those two options. “You’re vile,” she informs him. The ceramic almost burns her fingers: perfection.

“I have immense job satisfaction!” He crows and storms from her doorway into the main living area, thundering down the stairs, skipping the last one. Something crashes; she wonders if he’s knocked over her water glass from the night before. She listens to the sound of glass against the floor, the shards ringing, ringing out, before drinking deep from her cup and moving out of the doorway and into the disaster zone Sherlock has made of the downstairs living area. 

 

*

Here is what Joan does not realize about Sherlock, not yet: he has never experienced the same quiet space she lives in. His head is never that still, that uncluttered, that heavy and blank. What is boils down to is that Sherlock doesn’t know himself: he just lives in fear of every flaw, he is caught in the frantic rush of his mind and the little voice in his head that lies and tells him how much better he could be, with the drugs, without the threat of love. Sherlock lives in a state of possibility, in the shadow of a doubt that is also a threat, also a promise: he knows a thousand ways that he might lose Joan and lose New York and, worst of all, lose himself again. All of them are mostly his fault, as they almost always will be.


End file.
